Myth: Backyard Abortions

As senior Government figures state their view that there are too many abortions, especially late abortions, and pro-choice voices raise the spectre of backyard deaths if abortions are restricted by law, it is time, says Dr David van Gend, to correct the historical and clinical misconceptions surrounding the “myth” of the backyard butcher.

There is no denying the power of the “No coat-hangers” cry raised by abortion pressure-groups in response to recent public statements by politicians, but it is the power of emotional blackmail. It says to citizens, if you put any limits at all on abortion, women will die again in the backyard, and you will be responsible.

That vision, however, is an illusion. The whole backyard butcher scare campaign can be discredited by a few historical facts. Women will not die as a result of laws limiting abortion.

Fact one: making abortion legal or illegal has never, historically, made the slightest detectable difference to the safety of women. This is because of fact two: that medicine alone, not the law, has achieved all the magnificent gains in maternal safety.

These dramatic gains were made by medical breakthroughs such as antibiotics in the 1940s, blood transfusion, improved surgical techniques and emergency services – and the medical gains were achieved before there was a single liberal law or “safe legal clinic”.

Study the entire Australian Bureau of Statistics data on Causes of Death 1906-1996. Observe the death rate for illegal abortion plummet from about 100 deaths every year in the 1930s (before antibiotics) to just one death in the whole of Australia in 1969 (the last year of the old “backyard” regime) – before there was a single “legal” clinic anywhere in the country. All this was thanks to medical advances alone, with the legal status of abortion unchanged and irrelevant.

Observe also that maternal deaths from all causes – childbirth, miscarriage, abortion – dropped exactly in parallel, for the exact same medical reasons. It was medical progress, not legal agitation, which made abortion (whether criminal or medical), and childbirth, irreversibly safer.

Facts one and two dispel the cherished illusion that “illegal” means “unsafe”, and that “therefore it must be legal” – the trump card of the abortion lobby.

This is beginning to be acknowledged even by abortion supporters. Writing in the US journal Women’s Quarterly, Candice Crandall reluctantly accepts that medical advances, not legal changes, were responsible for improved safety: “In fact, it wasn’t Roe v Wade (the US Supreme Court ruling in 1973 to legalise abortion) that made abortion safe: it was the availability of antibiotics beginning in the 1940s.”

She also confirms that “the most powerful of the pro-choice arguments was the claim that any infringement of the right to an abortion would return America to the dark ages when thousands of women died because of unsafe, back-alley abortion”.

Thousands of women? In fact, she notes, the US death toll had dropped to 41 in the year before Roe v Wade, not the ten thousand figure promoted by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL).

Co-founder of NARAL, Dr Bernard Nathanson, writes: “I confess that I knew the figures were totally false – but the overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible.” Whatever it takes.

Yes, genuine limits on abortion would again drive some selfish abortions “underground”, but certain things do indeed belong underground – like paedophilia, drug-dealing, and the killing of our young.

And we should not over-dramatise the dangers of going underground: historically the so-called “backyard” usually was, and would be again, merely the “backroom” of a qualified doctor’s surgery.

In such covert but clean circumstances, and with routine backup at Casualty, the immediate physical risk of illegal abortion would be very ordinary.

I say “immediate physical risk", because there are other profound injuries, moral and emotional, sustained in creating a place of death in one’s own body, which are far from ordinary, and delayed risks such as breast cancer which are not yet well defined.

Enforcing genuine limits on abortion does not place women at any significant physical risk, because medicine has minimised that risk.

The current alternative is to have no limits, to permit the wholesale slaughter of unwanted unborn children – “children”, as one writer put it, “who would have loved you” – and the wholesale scarring of young mothers’ (and fathers’) hearts, which might lose the capacity to love at all.

Above article was written by Dr David van Gend Used with permission.

** David van Gend is a family doctor, university lecturer and Queensland secretary for the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life.